Hi, I’m Rainy. I began this blog back in 2006, although then it was called Tempest in a Tibetan Bowl. It was a place for me to ruminate about topics related to religion, spirituality, and mental health, amongst other things, and it has largely remained so. I changed the name to Bipolar Bodhisattva after having a minor epiphany whilst watching the PBS documentary “The Buddha”. It has always been my desire to help others in ways that would ease suffering, and that is essentially the role of a bodhisattva. The Mahayana branch of Buddhism believes we all have the potential to tap into our hidden bodhi, our potential to awaken to the true nature of reality, and so we all have the potential to be bodhisattvas as well.

Not coincidentally in my mind, the birth of Bipolar Bodhisattva also occurred in conjunction with what I would recognize in hindsight as my own awakening of a kind. It’s been a long process fraught with emotional, intellectual, and even physical peril, one I would not be making it through without the love of my family and the patience and tenacity of my therapist. Awakening, or its less accurate synonym, enlightenment, isn’t like flipping a light switch. It’s a whole series of switches that may even be infinite in nature: flip one on to light a room, and there are two more switches on the wall beyond it.

While my pre-awakening posts tended to be about either mental health or spirituality, now they are often about both since they have become inextricably linked in my mind. Much as Carl Jung believed, I see no difference between the search for the true Self and the search for Universal Divinity. They are one and the same: find one and you find the other. This realization has enabled me to see life through a completely different lens, one that is very different from most others, I’ve found. Some are appreciative of my insights, while some are not.

Whereas my earlier posts were also largely an attempt to understand myself on a personal level, since awakening they have at least become partly an attempt to piece together this immense puzzle I keep glimpsing as the awakening process unfolds, one that reveals each of our interconnectedness to one another in many different ways. I also believe that “we are the manifestation of the Universe trying to understand itself”, as the saying goes, and as such it presents itself to us in as many ways as possible so that it, and we, can be understood. As such, I’ve found immense use for all of the various things I read about in the years of my life prior to awakening, as though past me was collecting all of that knowledge for future use.

As I am still in the midst of this ever-unfolding awakening process and going through the “joy” of women’s mid-life at the same time, I find myself becoming a different person than I was when I started this blog, or even from when I changed its name a few years ago. I expect the content of my blog to change as well. I’m sure there will still be a fair amount of psychological and spiritual rumination, though it will be through a changed mental telescope. There will also be a fair number of travel posts, as I have relocated to a place of extraordinary beauty. There will also be art posts, as one of the things that happened to me upon awakening was an explosion of creativity, yielding such creations as the painting above. I’m looking forward to seeing what the new me has to say and show. I hope you are too.